For those wondering, I'm not dead yet. It's just that I've been really tired lately as I've been participating in a long work-related project whch is stealing all of my time.

Anyway, I decided not to be so lazy and took some time to update some Brazilian Portuguese translations for Debian package maintainers which asked me for updates as well as (finally) review the translations of the "update-manager" and "update-notifier" Ubuntu packages.

decko asked me to review them some time ago as he's trying to package them aiming for including them into Debian-BR-CDD and latter into Debian proper.

Since some time I've been wondering why name resolution under my 2.6 box was so slow. I even set up a local caching-only nameserver and it didn't helped at all.

Today, after I read Jeremy Wells review of Ubuntu on OSnews I gave his tip on ipv6 module loading prevention a try. Woo ! Now name resolution is working again at the same level it should be always working.

I already did it to my two home machines (my router and my laptop) and now they are much better to work with when it comes to name resolution (i.e. always for me).

Ok, I left my job and now (well, unofficially, since two weeks ago) I'm officially unimployed. That's not all that bad because I was trying to leave the job since some months but never encountered the right moment to do it.

Now it's done I'm looking for a new job, preferably a FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) related one. Well, let's begin it all again ..

Finally uploaded a newer ibackup package closing the minor issue regarding wrong paths in README.Debian for ibackup.conf example file. While working with ibackup packaging, I also took the opportunity to check it's Standards-Version and bump it to the latest (3.6.1.0, ATM).

Additionally, as it seemed a good chance to convert debian/control to UTF-8, I did it. Bad idea. The upload was fine and the bug was closed, but the bug closing message was sent me to me as if it were closed by a Non-Maintainer-Upload (NMU).

I guess I will need to revert debian/control back to ISO-8859-1 in the next upload. I also started using accents in my name in debian/control (hey, UTF-8 is supposed to allow everyone to properly read them) and that's what broke everything, as my identity in GnuPG's public key isn't using accents at all.

Would it be better to change my GnuPG key identity to use accents ? Wouldn't it screw up everything and prevent me from uploading newer packages ? Anyone reading, I would like to know your opinions.

Translated from scratch debconf templates of five Debian packages today. All of them were already sent to Debian BTS. Also updated choose-mirror's templates translation for d-i, which had a nice revamp template-wise.

Started to update aptitude's translation as requested by Daniel Burrows in order to hopefully have Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR) as a 100% supported language from the very first release of version 0.2.14.

UML

Created a couple of crap scripts to be used with up statements in /etc/network/interfaces in order to set up needed routes and let the UML virtual machine to exchange packets with the UML host and the outside world. They are working fine and now I don't need to type endless commands everytime I start my UML virtual machine anymore. Nice.

Received a request from someone who read my last post and asked me if I could share my user-mode-linux package with the patch to fix the problem with 2.6 hosts included. Tried to send him a reply with the URL to the package but the message bounced back to me with the following error :

Obviously, I'm not using the real data from the user/his ISP in the above the error message. That might be due to me not using an official SMTP server as I prefer to use my own local MTA (from my laptop). As I'm not going to change this, for the user which requested my package and to everyone else to whom it may interest, you can fetch it from here.

Be warned : As this package was created to be used for testing purposes, I created the linux binary kernel with lots of features included and also included lots of others features as modules (like IPVS, crypto algorithms, almost all of the iptables modules, QoS modules, etc) which are not turned on in the official user-mode-linux package.

It's done. Now I have a fancy UML virtual machine, which is running on a 2.6 host (my laptop). It's currently empty, only holding a basic Debian woody system, but I'm planning to use it to test a lot of things which would require a separated machine otherwise.

I have also built a custom user-mode-linux Debian package, which is in fact the latest user-mode-linux package from Debian unstable plus the patch to fix the nasty "I'm tracing myself and I can't get out" bug. I'll keep using this package until a fixed package is released so, for now, it's being kept on hold. If you are interested, I can upload it somewhere and let you grab it so you can use it yourself.

Debian

Updated some translations for d-i and managed to bring it all back to 100% translated. Scott also replied my message asking him to add my RSS feed to Planet Debian so hopefully this is my very first post being featured on Planet Debian.

Now what's left is only to find out a way to send Scott a picture to be used as a thumbnail when a post of mine appears on Planet Debian. That's going to be quite difficult by itself since I have no scanner and no digital camera. Maybe it's time to start thinking about buying one. Hmm ...

I was bitten by the nasty "I'm tracing myself and I can't get out" UML bug on 2.6 Linux hosts. Did some research and found a patch by Jeff Dike which claims to fix the mess. I've already download user-mode-linux source (the Debian package source, I mean) and right now I'm downloading all the needed build-deps. Once everything finishes downloading I'll try to build a Debian package with the patch applied and start playing with UML on 2.6.

I had already played with UML a bit some months ago under 2.4 and found it really useful when I needed to do some experiments and won't afford losing my main box. After going 2.6, I won't go back to 2.4 again only for UML as I'm pretty satisfied with how 2.6 is performing on my box. A working UML is the main thing which keeps me from being completely happy on my 2.6 box.

I everything turns out to work fine, I'll have a lot of work to do and lots of hacking/installing/configuring in order to put into practice all the ideas I have im mind currently. Nice !